Mariska Hargitay Wins Two Emmys for "My Mom Jayne," the Documentary That Finally Let Her Know Her Mother

Hargitay's directorial debut about Jayne Mansfield, the Hollywood star she lost in a car accident when she was three, won Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Best Directing at Saturday's Creative Arts Emmys. It's her first Emmy in twenty years, and the first one she's won for something she made herself.

By Gustavo Henrique · About the author

LOS ANGELES · SEP 5, 2026 ~5 MIN READ

Updated on September 8, 2026 · Editorial update: source review, context and clarity.

Mariska Hargitay spent 27 seasons playing a detective who solves other people's worst nights. On Saturday, at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, she won her first Emmy in two decades for solving one of her own. "My Mom Jayne," the HBO documentary she wrote, directed, and produced about her late mother, actress Jayne Mansfield, took home Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special at the first of two Creative Arts Emmy ceremonies leading into the Sept. 14 Primetime telecast. Minutes later, Hargitay won again, for Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program — the same film, a rare double that only underlined how personal this particular category race was for her.

Fast Facts

Hargitay's directorial debut about Jayne Mansfield, the Hollywood star she lost in a car accident when she was three, won Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Best Directing at Saturday's Creative Arts Emmys.
It's her first Emmy in twenty years, and the first one she's won for something she made herself.
Mariska Hargitay spent 27 seasons playing a detective who solves other people's worst nights.

A film she made to finally meet her mother

Hargitay was three years old in 1967 when Mansfield was killed in a car crash outside New Orleans. Mariska and her two older brothers, Zoltan and Mickey Jr., were asleep in the back seat and survived; their father, Hungarian-born bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, raised all three alone afterward. That left Hargitay with almost no memory of her own mother — only the "blonde bombshell" image the world had of Jayne Mansfield, a woman who was in fact multilingual and classically trained on piano and violin, and whose talent got flattened by the persona Hollywood decided to sell instead. "My Mom Jayne" is Hargitay's attempt to dig past that image, sitting down with her siblings, her stepmother, and one of Mansfield's oldest friends to work through family history that had stayed unspoken for decades, including a long-held question about who her biological father really was. It premiered at Cannes and Tribeca in June 2025 and is streaming now on HBO Max.

The line from Gloria Steinem that hit differently on Saturday

Accepting the first award, Hargitay credited someone she called her hero and friend: Gloria Steinem, who had recently told her to "tell your own story" because storytelling is how people come to know one another. It read as an offhand tribute until you remember the timing — Steinem died two days earlier, on Wednesday, at 92, a loss this newsroom covered when it happened. Hargitay likely finished the speech she'd written before that news broke, which made hearing it land in the past tense, twice over, harder than she could have intended: one woman's death giving unplanned weight to another woman's decades-late attempt to understand her own mother's life. "I got to know my mother through telling the story, and it is a gift that is indescribable," Hargitay said, before crediting producer Trish Adlesic and the rest of the team who helped her get there.

Twenty years between Emmys, and a very different kind of win

Hargitay's only previous Emmy came in 2006, for lead actress in "Law & Order: SVU," the role that has now defined more than a quarter-century of her career. This one is different in kind, not just in category: it's the first time she's been recognized for something she built from scratch rather than performed. The film had already picked up the Critics Choice Documentary Award for best first feature in November and a spot on the National Board of Review's list of the year's top documentaries, even after it was passed over for the Oscar's documentary shortlist. Speaking to Deadline last month, Hargitay called the entire year — SVU's 27th season, her Broadway debut in "Every Brilliant Thing," and now this — "cathartic," and described the film itself as "the gift that just keeps on giving." She'll get one more turn in the spotlight this month: Hargitay hosts the 78th Primetime Emmys live on Sept. 14, in what NBC is marking as its 100th anniversary year.

Coverage of the ceremony and Hargitay's remarks also draws on reporting from Gold Derby, USA Today, and Deadline.

Gustavo Henrique Weighs In

I've covered enough awards seasons to know most acceptance speeches are forgettable by the next morning. This one won't be, and not because of the trophy. Hargitay spent her whole public life being the daughter of a punchline — Jayne Mansfield got remembered as a pin-up long before anyone bothered mentioning she spoke five languages — and it took her until 62 to build the thing that finally argued otherwise, on her own terms, with her own name on it as director instead of just star. That's a specific kind of late-career risk that a lot of famous people never bother taking, because it's so much safer to just keep playing the character everyone already loves you as. What got me, honestly, was the accident of timing with the Steinem line. Hargitay couldn't have known how it would land when she wrote it. But grief has a way of doing that to the people left holding someone else's words — it hands them back heavier than they were given. I don't think that makes the speech sadder so much as truer to what the whole film is actually about: what we owe each other by simply telling the truth about who we were.

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